Plants and Animals + Lost in the Trees: 9.June.2010 - New York

Before trading in his moccasins for boat shoes, Warren Spicer and Plants and Animals put some sweat into it at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City Wednesday night.

Perhaps what’s most impressive about Montreal trio Plants and Animals is that they can play through both hyperbolic lines (“It takes an enemy to make you get out of bed”) and cliché ones (“hard at work but hardly working”) without losing any intensity or credibility. An epic garage rock outfit that ostensibly values instrumentation and song-structure over lyrics, their perspiration, not lyrical delineations, is what’s most pertinent.

So when a fan mockingly cried out, “Lazy!” after lead singer, and guitarist, Warren Spicer shared the band’s weekend holiday plans in Cape Cod, Spicer’s sweat-dripping brow was an adequate rebuttal.

Though the band was touring mostly in support of their latest record, La La Land, songs from 2008’s Parc Avenue were stronger live. The monumental composition “Faerie Dance” left mic stands knocked over, and “Bye Bye Bye” closed their set, with choral assistance from openers Lost in the Trees turning it into a Queen-like anthem. Still, “The Mama Papa”, from La La, laid a great guitar riff on top of drummer Matthew Woodley’s deceivingly simple beat. For an encore, the crowd voted for “Mercy” and its afropop licks.

Lost in the Trees, under the leadership of Ari Picker, played a nice set of orchestral pop beforehand, however their arrangements were oversaturated affairs, with awful French horn parts seeming forced. They also, more or less, ignored their genre’s best tool: dynamics—except when they dramatically unplugged their instruments to play their last song from the middle of the venue.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.